NASA got its hands on the biggest asteroid sample since the Apollo missions : A sample of the Asteroid Bennu landed on Earth yesterday after seven years of travel through space, the National Geographic reported. Attempts to extract a sample small enough to be carried back to us, NASA’s 2016 OSIRIS-REx mission — short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer — resulted in the collection of a 250 gm asteroid specimen that will be studied at the Johnson Space Center near Houston.

250 gms of invaluable molecular knowledge: The asteroid sample — which was selected due to its proximity to Earth — may divulge data regarding the solar system’s past and the beginning of life on Earth. In fact, these ordinary-looking rocks preserve a record of the forces and processes that contributed to the creation of our planet over 4.5 bn years ago, according to Johns Hopkins University geophysicist Olivier Barnouin. “This material hasn’t really changed much since the earliest stage of the formation of the solar system,” he added.

We are just beginning to unpack the sample’s potential. Asteroids appear to be rich in carbon, aluminum, platinum, and other crucial metals. The discovery of water in small amounts could also have tremendous consequences. And while one capsule returned a sample from Bennu, another was launched to explore the asteroid Apophis by 2029.

As personal and professional boundaries are blurred, work-life balance is being replaced by “work-life integration,” according to an article by the US Chamber of Commerce. After the pandemic upended the way we work, new terms are being used to convey new realities. Rather than the incisive demarcations — both physical and time-based — that once separated home and office life, new expressions show how the two can often overlap if not merge entirely in situations where people work from home for instance.

But not everyone is into that. Skepticism regarding the new terminology is pervasive among people — dubbed “segmenters” — who think segregation between the two realms is necessary, Bloomberg says. Unlike “integrators,” the former are holding on to their “right to disconnect,” a possibility that is at risk when frontiers are obscured leading to work increasingly encroaching on personal life.

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